The Old Gringo

This is a quiet gentle story of an aging man who comes to Mexico to die by the hand of Pancho Villa and an American woman who eventually finds herself involved with a Villa general. Both have baggage in the US and are trying to find something in Mexico that has been missing from their lives.

I thoroughly enjoyed Fuentes' The Old Gringo. It constitutes everything a novel should be: love, death, war, sex, etc. It includes themes of brotherhood, colonialism, relations between the US and Mexico, freedom, love across national boundaries, and what it is to die. I found Fuentes' prose to be beautiful and diverse; an intersubjective consciousness flows through the characters, revealing as well that we are all only readers, and we will never know the real story. Beacuse of his style, Fuentes enriches the text, makes it stand out and vibrate with life. It's tactile. His characters are complex and story line great. For anyone interested in Latin-American works, I would highly recommend this one. It takes the revolution and gives it the colors we would never see as outsiders.

A wonderful, engrossing, stylishly written, suspenseful, compact gem of a book. But after reading it, I was shocked to find the average customer rating to be 3 stars. This was based on just 2 reviews, one giving it 5 stars and the other 1 star. I suggest that an average rating not be given when the number of reviews is so small, where the effect of just one negative review (which I find in this case to be completely unjustified) can be devastating and misleading to potential readers.

Gringo Viejo no tiene el mismo estilo de La Muerte de Artemio Cruz, es más ligero. El libro nos lleva a conocer las fronteras u obstaculos que tiene cada uno de los personajes y las de ambas culturas: Norteamericana y Mexicana. En lo personal me gustaría un final distinto. Si alguien quisiera comentarlo personalmente mande un mail.

A wise and insightful book on the age-old attraction to Mexico for Gringos from the United States. Carlos is a super-smart writer, and for the smart reader, this book is required reading.